Security Fix

The hijacking of the nation’s largest e-bill payment system this week offers a glimpse of an attack that experts say is likely to become more common in 2009.

Atlanta based CheckFree acknowledged Wednesday that hackers had, for several hours, redirected visitors to its customer login page to a Web site in Ukraine that tried to install password-stealing software.

While this attack garnered few headlines, there are clues that suggest it may have affected a large number of people. CheckFree claims that more than 24 million people use its services. Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., said CheckFree controls between 70 to 80 percent of the U.S. online bill pay market. Among the 330 kinds of bills consumers can pay through CheckFree are military credit accounts, utility bills, insurance payments, mortgage and loan payments.